five things I would tell you if you told me you’re thinking about starting a blog

I get the question all the time, why did you start your blog? And the second most asked question is, how do you start a blog? I also get asked, why should I start a blog? I’m not going to answer the latter question here (that’s a whole other post on its own) and while this post will not answer how to actually start a blog, hopefully you’ll find the advice useful.

A few months ago, a good friend introduced me to her cousin (via email), who wanted to start a blog, and asked me to give her some advice. The long, long response I wrote back was motivation for this post. I have given the same general advice back to many people who have asked for initial advice when starting a blog and I thought I’d share it here.

**************A lot of what I know, I learned from others. For that I’m eternally grateful and I believe in paying it forward. Thanks to Lindsay for giving me a bunch of ideas for #2!

So here are five things I would tell you if you told me you’re thinking about starting a blog…

1. Start now!! I mean right now.

I talked about starting a food blog for at least 6 to 7 months before I started The Little Kitchen. I kept telling my sister, Connie, that I wanted to start one. One of my excuses was I needed a ‘nice’ camera and my sister said, “stop wasting time talking about it, just do it.” Best. advice. ever. I think I bought thelittlekitchen.net domain within a day after she said that to me and started the actual blog within a couple.

When starting a blog, it’s impossible to learn everything you ‘think’ you need to know, it’s impossible to have the perfect site designed and laid out exactly the way you want and it’s impossible to think of everything before starting. Those are the most important things I learned.

So my advice is don’t waste time talking about it, doooo it. I have told everyone that will listen, my only regret is not starting my blog when I said I wanted to.

2. use wordpress

I’m not going to go into all of the blogging platforms and I won’t go into the whys. I initially didn’t start on WordPress but transferred my blog from another platform (I’m sure most people have never even thought what I used was even a blogging platform). I just tell anyone that asks to start on WordPress and self-host. If you can’t start out by investing a little capital going the self-hosted route, start your blog on WordPress.com (it’s free). But be sure to register the domain name that you want as soon as you decide on the name for your blog!

If you’re using self-hosted WordPress, then you can install plugins. You don’t want to overdo it and install five million plugins but there are a bunch that I love and can’t live without. Here’s a list of some of the ones I like:

Akismet – catches spam comments so you don’t have to use those awful recaptcha plugins for comments

RSS No More – it drives me nuts when I subscribe to a blog and the blogger truncates their RSS feed to just one or two sentences! Use this plugin to truncate your feed and give your readers a little bit more. It will cut it off at the “more” tag or wherever you place another “cut” tag. I use this plugin and cut the feed off right before the recipe. If you’re worried about content scrapers, this will help a little bit because they can’t scrape your entire post since you’re truncating it. And it’s a really good way to figure out if they are scraping your site via your RSS feed.

some kind of contact form plugin or provide some way to contact you. You never know why someone would want to contact you. And you won’t believe how many people have NO way to contact them on their blog. It’s frustrating when you want to ask a question or contact them for a good reason!

Other WordPress and non-WordPress-related advice:

Feedburner – or sign up for any kind of RSS syndication, especially if you’re using Blogger or WordPress.com. Subscribers will not forward if you finally decide to switch to self-hosted WordPress or another blogging platform. Which means, you can lose a lot of subscribers. *Also, something I recently learned the hard way myself, if you’re signing up for FeedBurner, be sure to use the same gmail or google account you signed up for AdSense or vice versa. If you ever decide to add AdSense ads to your feedburner feeds, you’ll thank me.

Sign up for a Gravatar account. If you want your blog logo or your photograph to show up when commenting on other WordPress blogs, sign up for it!

Statistics – Use either WordPress stats or install google analytics. You’ll be happy that you set up statistics from the beginning, you never know when you’ll need to reference them.

Image cropping – Crop and resize first, then upload. When I first started, I resized but the image was still pretty big. My site took a long time to load and I slowly cropped and resized smaller but even up until last year, I was using a file size that was too large and topping out the bandwidth in my hosting plan. Keep your images between 100 and 200 kilobytes (or even less than 100 kilobytes) and your site will load faster and you won’t use up your bandwidth (which in some cases can bring your site down).

Before I hired a designer to redesign The Little Kitchen, I actually used Thesis and customized it myself.

3. Sign up for at least two social networking sites.

And add the links to them in a prominent location on your site. When I first started, I signed up for twitter and found that I loved it. Later on, I created a fan page for my blog on facebook and loved being able to interact with people who read my blog but at the same time keep my personal profile private.

And of course, there is so much social media now and you can easily become overwhelmed. I’m on all of the above in the collage (instagram, Google+ & Pinterest) and I love it. Yes, that’s a lot but I’m passionate obsessed with about social media and I love teaching others what I have learned along the way.

It’s not just about self-promotion though on these social networking sites. Promote others and…

4. build and foster community

Make friends, comment on blogs that you like to read. Teach others and learn from one another. Support each other and cheer each other on. We grow and become better people when we support each other. Each blogging genre has a community and whether you know it or not, when you start a blog, you join that community.

I had no idea I would join an amazing food blog community when I started this little ol’ food blog. It’s filled with generous people and I have been lucky to make some amazing friends.

5. be genuine, be authentic & always be yourself

and be positive. I love blogging, the people I have met and the wonderful opportunities it has provided to me. I love being on social networking sites. What I always want to shine through is me. I’m not trying to be anyone but myself. I think it’s very important that we’re genuine.

You know as well as I do, it’s very disappointing when looks are actually deceiving. I always want to be truthful and to share who I am. There’s no reason for me not to. The best blogs that I enjoy are that way…and when I have the opportunity to meet a blogger in person and they are just as they seem online, it’s very refreshing and invigorating. So just be you!

This by no means is a comprehensive list…if you’re a blogger yourself, any advice you would add to my list?

I wish I had someone tell me all these things when I first started out, this is going to be a great starting point for a lot of future bloggers.

These are some great tips. Sometimes the need to foster community can be overshadowed by the many other things needed to get a blog up and running. But fellowship is key to growing and really enjoying your blog.

Oh, I so wish I had started on WP from the get-go. So many people underestimate where there blogs will take them–I never thought mine would be anything more than a hobby, so I started it on Blogger.

These are great tips and the exact thing I tell others when they want to start a blog. I also tell them blogs can be as much or as little work as they want 😉 For me personally, it’s a lot of work, but this is what I do for a living. For others, their blog is their hobby and takes very little time. It really can be exactly what you want it to be. Thanks for sharing these fab tips.

That’s pretty awesome to hear, Lindsay. When you start it, will you send me the link so I can check it out? 🙂

I’m so glad I found your post Julie!! I’m a newbie to food blogging =))

I am not a blogger, but I love reading lots and lots of blogs. I read all of them through Google Reader and I really appreciate the advice to not truncate the RSS feed. I will not add a blog to my Google Reader if it’s truncated because I often read them on my smart phone and it’s way easier to just stay in Google Reader to read them.

This is such an awesome list! I wish I had seen something like this before I started blogging – so much fantastic info, Julie!

All wonderful advice, Julie. Spot on, as always!

I SO value and appreciate this post, Julie! New bloggers will benefit from each piece of advice, and ‘old’ ones, such as myself, can benefit as well (I didn’t have the comment notification plugin either – I do now thanks to you!). Thank you so much for such a helpful post!!

Yay, Meagan! I can’t wait to see you tomorrow! 🙂

This is all great advice! And can I just say that I HATE it when people truncate their posts to nothing at all or just a sentence? Those blogs just don’t get read by me.

I’m on Blogger and wish that it had some of those amazing sounding plug-ins. I have to admit that I’m pretty comfy with it and don’t really want to change. So I’m sure this post will be super helpful for people who haven’t started yet!

Great post! This will be so helpful for all the newbies looking to break into this wonderful community.

Great tips! This is much the same advice I give people.
For me, first and foremost is “register your domain name”. If you don’t own your name, you could lose it later when you do want it.
Also, if you go the free blog route, you lose all your stats when you switch to self hosted (learned this the hard way).

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Hi there, friend!!

Welcome to The Little Kitchen! I'm Julie and I love to cook, bake, eat and share (not necessarily in that order). I share easy recipes, stories about my family (which includes my pets) and my travels. And I actually have a little kitchen...